In as little time as two decades from now, children will be enraptured by our tales about how we manually guided our cars to get where we required them to go. We will explain the thrill of getting our licenses, the exasperation of getting lost, the frustration of traffic, and the horror of car crashes. They will listen in wide-eyed fascination and contemplation of how interesting life must have been in the Olden Days. But the future of cars may be approaching faster than they know.
Autonomous cars, it seems, will be coming soon: Google intends to release its self-driving car to the consumer public in 2020, and while Google has been taking up the majority of self-driving car headlines, other auto companies are not far behind. BMW’s car is Google’s closest competition. Apple has been clarifying official California policy for its own autonomous car, codenamed Titan, which is rumored to be close to production. Mercedes has predicted that its autonomous car, the F 015 Luxury in Motion, will be released in 2030. Elon Musk tweeted in July about Tesla’s new autosteer and autopark technologies. All these companies want a share in the newly emerging autonomous car market.
Google, however, wants more than that: it wants to wants to radically and fundamentally transform the very core of the automobile. The defining element in Google’s vision is that its goal is to rapidly integrate the self-driving feature into every car, while BMW, Mercedes, and other car manufacturers have been pioneering software in cars that will be continuously developed until the cars gradually become autonomous. These companies have been testing cars that are intended to drive on the road along with regular, human-guided cars, which Chris Urmson, the head of the self-driving car project at Google, asserted in his TED talk is tantamount to believing that, “If I work really hard at jumping, one day I’ll just be able to fly!” Another risk with gradual improvement models is that people may assume cars have safety and automated features that they do not actually have, which can be extremely dangerous on the road. This conservative attitude is likely to reduce accidents, though, as flaws are discovered and fixed early – not after they cause accidents.
What else will change with the advent of autonomous cars? Plenty. Traffic is another mainstay of vehicular life that may become obsolete; Google’s computers will manipulate a vast network of cars, guiding cars onto the most efficient routes. Bottlenecking would also be a thing of the past. Disabled, elderly, intoxicated, and unlicensed people could travel easily. Ridesharing would become much more popular (90% of our cars’ lifetimes are spent parked; if a car could drive itself to different people and owners, it will be easy to share a car among groups). Urban sprawl will increase. Parking spaces will become outdated.
The drastic decrease in auto accidents is significant, too. 81% of all car accidents are caused by human error, which would be eliminated. One study estimates that if 90% of United States vehicles were autonomous, “4.2 million accidents could be avoided, saving 21,700 lives and $450 billion in related costs.” In the United Kingdom, the KPMG estimates that self-driving cars will lead to 2,500 fewer deaths between 2014 and 2030. A frequent fear is that the autonomous car will cause its own accidents. But safety is a priority, at least for Google: Matthew Inman of The Oatmeal wrote of his trip in a Google car that “The car we rode in did not strike me as dangerous. It struck me as cautious. It drove slowly and deliberately, and I got the impression that it’s more likely to annoy other drivers than to harm them.” The maximum speed for Google’s car is 25 mph, which according to Urmson, covers the driving speed in most cities.
So when will it be? As of September 2015, there are only four states that allow self-driving car use – Florida, Michigan, California, and Nevada, as well as Washington, D.C. As self-driving cars begin to enter the roads and public consciousness, self-driving vehicle technology will become a hotly debated issue and more states will approve them. There is already much discussion on the topic, and 99 pages of legal analysis can be found here (pdf).
We are about to see a revolution of science fiction-proportions. In the Guardian’s words, it is one that will be “a paradigm shift rather than a marginal gain.” Like all self-driving cars, Google’s car is pricey – about $75,000. There are chinks that needs to be ironed out and safety issues that need to be addressed. Nonetheless, we will likely be seeing Google’s friendly android cars operating before long, and I, for one, welcome our new autonomous overlords.
